Linux for Suits - The No-Party System

I always have been fascinated by the expression “third
party” as it is used in business. What do we mean by that? And,
why don't we talk about first party and second party, except in legal documents?
Third party clearly labels
its members as subordinates to first and second parties. In technology,
third parties inhabit a business ecosystem defined by a large vendor
(the first party) and its relationship with customers and users (second
parties). Wikipedia says, “In computer programming, and particularly in
Microsoft Windows programming, 'third-party software component' refers
to a reusable software component developed to be either freely
distributed or sold by an entity other than the original vendor of the
development platform.”

By that definition, third-party software plays a value-adding role in a
market ecosystem defined by the vendor. In architectural terms, the
vendor's role is to provide a platform that supports both second and
third parties. Platforms in turn serve as foundations for silos:
locked-in market spaces controlled by the vendor.

Linux doesn't work that way, nor does the software we call free or open source.
Yet Linux seems to have third parties. Look up
“third-party software” on Google and the top
result—at this moment, at least—is Third-party
Quickcam, a table of Linux resources that's maintained by Patrick Reynolds
of the Computer Science Department at Duke University. Here's a fun digression:
a search for “Linux” on the Department Web site returns 1,140 results,
and a search for “Windows” returns 2,360 results, the first of which
is “Emacs/G++ on Windows Machines”. It begins, “You'll need
three things to make your Windows machine work like a Linux/Unix machine.”

The third-party Quickcam software on Patrick Reynolds' list
may work with Linux, but it isn't controlled by Linux in the way
third-party applications for Windows and OS X are controlled by
Microsoft and Apple. That's because Linux isn't a company. As one Linux
programmer once told me, “Linux can't sue anybody.” In fact, Linux
isn't even a platform of the sort defined by Windows and Mac OS. Instead, Linux
is a form of building material that grows in the wild and naturally is suited
for making foundations and frameworks. The wild in this case is
fertile human mentation, which is why it evolves and
improves in the course of being put to use.

The limits to Linux's usefulness also are natural
ones. No company restricts anybody's right to use
it. Because Linux embodies and expresses the GNU
General Public License (GPL), Linux is not only free
as in beer and free as in freedom, but free as
in marketplace. Both Linux and the software that
runs on it are unconstrained by formalized business
relationships defined primarily by one party. The
primary practical purpose of free software is to be
useful, not to serve as a platform for a silo—even if platform
vendors build silos on it anyway, as, for example, Apple's OS X does on FreeBSD.
Hey, it's a free market.

For years I've been carrying around a discomfort with the
platform label for Linux and the third-party label for software that runs on
it. That discomfort verged on pain when I wandered around CES
(Computer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, January 2005. Shows such
as CES and MacWorld, which followed it, provide an interesting contrast to Linux
events, because they gather exhibitors that seem to operate on a set of
principles exactly opposite of those Linux holds.

At CES, for example, proprietary is a good
word, and digital rights management (DRM) is a good
feature. At CES, I lost count of the times somebody
reciting a scripted pitch on a vendor's stage bragged
about “our proprietary technology”. Red Hat, Novell,
IBM and Sun—none of whom were at CES, for whatever
that's worth—all have proprietary technologies, some more than others,
but you never hear them brag about it at LinuxWorld Expo.

I was fascinated to hear about one vendor or another
“owning” a market
or “dominating” a category. What does this mean for third parties in
owned or dominated categories? It seemed to me that their role, in spite of
whatever success they might achieve, still is a captive one, like a
prisoner or a slave.

In the central halls of CES, it seemed as though every
product category—audio/video, satellite systems,
mobile electronics, home theater, HDTV, digital
cameras and camcorders, to name only a few—were collections of
silos that I couldn't help but think of as prisons. For audio recording, Sony
had ATRAC. For digital IBOC (in-band, on-channel) AM/FM radio,
Ibiquity had HD Radio. For “digital lifestyle”
home PC/TV integration, Microsoft had Windows Media,
the Digital Media Edition of Windows XP and a raft
of other closed and proprietary products. Microsoft
partners all over the floor carried the Microsoft
PlayForSure logo, which serves two purposes: 1)
labeling third parties as members of Microsoft's
branded ecosystem and 2) sugar-coating the DRM
in Windows Media Player. The satellite radio (XM,
Sirius) and television (DishTV, Voom, DirecTV) vendors
were silos in themselves. Third-party antennas,
receivers and other devices all are built precisely
to specifications provided by the vendors.

Linux was all over the show, however, although few vendors were willing
to talk about it, much less brag about using it. When
I went looking for Linux stories at one name-brand
network equipment company, the head media relations
guy was summoned to tell me, with practiced precision,
“We can't talk about that.” When I pressed him, his
answers made it clear that the company's publicity
ports for Linux and open-source information were
blocked by the legal department. When I pressed
harder, the guy finally said, “Okay, I'll tell you
this much. You can't throw a stick at anything in
this booth and not hit something that runs on Linux.”

The biggest booth at the show was a collection of large rooms off the
Central Hall in which Sony showed off its latest and greatest. If there
was any Linux in those rooms, you wouldn't know it from Sony's
literature or hear about it from Sony staffers. The official Sony policy
on Linux and open source appeared to be stony silence—in spite of a
pro-Linux keynote given by Sony COO and President Kunitake Ando at CES
two years ago. “There's no Linux here”, one Sony guy told me, as if I had
showed up at Tiffany's asking for whiskey.

When I asked another Sony guy if the company ever would
make a portable digital audio device that could
record and play back Ogg, MP3 or formats other than
the company's own highly proprietary ATRAC, he said
“Oh no. There are copyright issues with those.” When
I asked him to explain those issues, he mumbled
something about people “stealing music”. I told him
Apple's iPod was not only kicking Sony's butt in the
portable audio market but was capable of recording
in MP3. He said there was nothing he could do about
that. He did assure me that Sony had no plans to make
an MP3 player.

The reason behind this stance, of course, is Sony isn't merely a consumer electronics
company: it's a music company as paranoid about
“piracy” as the rest of the tired old recording industry.
But, it doesn't need to be. Sony is crippling its legacy
business—electronics—to keep one of its acquired
businesses—music—from getting hurt. This allows
innovative and unconstrained competitors, such as Apple, to clean up in
a category Sony probably would dominate if it wasn't simply a collection of
battling business units whose conflicts are settled by lawyers.

The largest presence at CES was the absent
exhibitor whose own show followed the next week in
San Francisco—Apple. In October 2004, the NPD group said
Apple's iPod accounted for 92.1% of the market
for hard drive-based music players. In on-line music
retailing, Apple's iTunes Music Store is equally
dominant. Thanks to iTunes and iPod, the hardware
extension of iTunes software, Apple is becoming the
Microsoft of Music. And without music, there wouldn't
be a consumer electronics business. iPods were
everywhere at CES. And although Apple is far less
supportive of third parties than is Microsoft, it does
have a few. One is Motorola, which plans to come
out with an iTunes phone. Others are Belkin, BMW,
Mercedes and countless makers of cases, attachments
and various iPod accessories. More than one exhibitor
told me that many of the new Microsoft PlayForSure
partners were motivated by fear of Apple's success
with iPod and iTunes and the relative exclusivity
of Apple's partnership requirements.

All of which is interesting, but beside the point. The point is how Linux
and the pioneering values of its companions quietly are changing the world.

While everybody else watches battles among market fortresses,
pioneering developers quietly open and settle the wide open spaces where
freedom reigns. We see it happening in embedded operating systems; TiVos, Replay
TVs and countless network appliances at CES all run on Linux. We see it
happening with radio, in podcasting and with music recording, thanks to
Creative Commons-licensed artists and music. What's next?

The day after CES, I ran into Alan Graham, a programmer
and author. His latest book is Never Threaten To
Eat Your Co-Workers: Best of the Blogs, for which
I wrote the foreword. He told me we can expect the
same progress to happen with television:

Television is just information and information wants to be free. All
it's going to take to free it is one guy with one new invention, one
new cool implementation.

Go back 75 years to the early days of radio. People
complained, “You can't do music on radio!” But guess what? Radio
sold music.

Technology builds markets. Point to any technical breakthrough in
media, and you can point next to a market that got created by that
breakthrough. Look at videotape. Netflix. Blockbuster. Little
independent video rental places. Did the VCR kill the movie market?
No. It created a new market for movies. The same thing will happen
to television.

To seek relief on the last day of the show, I went over to the newly
renovated Alexis Park Hotel, which for the last several years has been
the home of the High Performance Audio corner of CES. In the old days,
exhibitors suffered exhibiting in the cavernous and noisy main halls. In
the Alexis Park, each exhibitor has its own small hotel suite. Sound
isolation is remarkably good, considering.

I went there looking for Linux stories and also because, many years
ago, I was an audiophile. This was back when vacuum tubes were going out
of fashion; they're back with a vengeance now. I built Dynaco pre-amps
and power amps from kits and knew the virtues and failings of countless
brands of turntables, amplifiers and tuners. I could never afford to be
a high-end customer and still can't, so I did the next-best thing—retailing. I worked as a salesman and a manager at several audio
“salons”, as they called them back then.

Although I expected to see and hear some far-out and high-priced audio gear
at the Alexis Park, I didn't expect to it to be a delightfully silo-free
zone. As with the freelance Linux hacker ecosystem, high-end audio is
inhabited mostly by smart and resourceful do-it-yourself builders, all
making whatever they feel like making, any way they want to make it,
without restrictions by any “platform” vendors. Instead, they all
regarded the big-name vendors, Sony, Technics, Bose—everything sold
in Circuit City and Best Buy—with disdain.

What's more, these gear hackers all were pursuing perfection—they call
it that—with products built mostly from standards-based components and
in a mostly open way. They bragged and argued about approaches,
implementations and results, in large measure because their materials
and building methods are open to inspection and discussion. Not
surprisingly, this included their use of Linux. Rodomir
“Boz” Bozovic,
PhD, of Tact Audio Labs told me his shop uses Linux in its pursuit of
“acoustical room correction, measurement and monitoring”. Mark Doehman,
Chief Designer at Continuum Audio Laboratories in Victoria, Australia,
told me the company's radical-looking turntable benefited from software
that did “wave shaping” and other stuff that sounded cool but I don't
remember. With luck they'll make it into a future story in
Linux Journal.

My favorite component was the RCA 833A vacuum tube, which is the size of
a pickle jar and was a workhorse for decades in radio transmission and
industrial heating applications. A number of speaker makers drove boxes
the size of coffins that cost more than luxury cars with WAVAC HE-833A
single-ended monoblock
amplifiers, which sell for $38,000 US. One speaker maker told me, with
pride and admiration for the WAVAC, that the 833A tube costs less than
$50. Like every other amplifier I saw at the Alexis Park, it was
differentiated by the quality and uniqueness of design, construction and, especially,
by the unique personalities behind the products. Sound
familiar?

So, what does this say about Linux and third parties? I asked Jeff
Wiegand, a veteran independent Web developer now working for the St.
Louis City Government, if the term third party makes any sense to him.
“It's only manufacturers and clients now”, he replied. Then he went on
to define manufacturer as “anybody who makes
anything that's useful.”

I did find some other examples back in the main halls at CES. For
example, I had long conversations with several executives at Frey
Technologies, which makes SageTV media centers. Among other things, they
were launching a new Linux version of the company's media center that “offers
the reliability and affordability of Linux without Windows licensing
fees or the more expensive hardware required to deploy Windows-based
systems”. CEO Dan Kardatzke told me the company started out working with
Microsoft but decided there was far more room to grow and compete
outside the Windows silo. “It was an economic decision to begin with.
The OEM cost of MC—the Media Center edition of Windows XP—is
$89 US.
But there are also these really high hardware costs, for processors and
graphics chip sets and so on. We can run on a 600MHz Pentium III.
There's also stability, reliability, networkability....”

Alan Graham also told me home entertainment battles will be won,
eventually, by the most open systems. He finds hope, for example, in the
relatively open ecosystem surrounding the Linux-based Replay TV:

Replays are just wonderful—far more flexible and capable than
TiVos. They have lots of inputs on the back and lots of ways they
let you control them, rather than vice versa. You can have several
Replays in your house, plug them all into a 100baseT network or a
wireless one, but you want wired for speed. You can swap out or
add bigger drives. And you can hack the whole thing into one big
system with DVArchive, which is a free Java program you can run on
Linux or anything else. You can set all your Replay recording
schedules for whatever you want to record. You can set DVArchive to
move videos off the Replays and onto your central server to archive
there.

You can also use the VLC media player to play them. VLC is free open-source
software. It runs on every platform you can name, including
all the Linux distros and even little handheld Linux devices. It
recognizes the Replay format, pulls off two reference files and the
video file. The beauty is you can take these Replay files and play
them in the VLC player, on the go. If you can plug in an Ethernet
cable and do minimal command-line work, you can do home
entertainment automation. You can build a video server system.
Today. So much stuff is already here. Not just Replay, DVArchive and
VLC, but proximity through Bluetooth and presence through XMPP.
Consider the possibilities.

It's a lot easier to consider those possibilities if you're a pioneering
member of the No-Party system.

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